


Of Gods and Monsters

by JeanjacketCarf



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Drabble, Edited, Gen, Introspection, Iris West character study, No Dialogue, World Building Headcanons, a long drabble, all seasons spoilers, hints of Westallen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 21:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11217036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanjacketCarf/pseuds/JeanjacketCarf
Summary: "The voices that spoke to Barry in the Speed Force were not benevolent but they were powerful and they made choices. It was no secret that they had chosen Barry. Iris had no doubt they had chosen her too, chosen all of them."Faced with her impending death, Iris reflects on the events of the last three years and the forces at work behind them.Takes place somewhere mid-Season 3





	Of Gods and Monsters

Iris West had never been naive about the world. She understood that sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes a lot of bad things happen to good people. Sometimes those bad things made people bad too. She understood all that, had for as long as she could remember. 

She had grown up without a mother. Her father was a cop and as hard as he tried to keep that part of his life away from her, he never hid the fact that people are capable of doing horrible things to one another. When she was eleven her father brought her best friend home because his mother was dead and his father was accused of being the one to make that happen. Iris didn’t believe Barry when he said his father wasn’t a killer because she didn’t want to believe that love could turn into one of those horrible things. She believed him because she knew you couldn’t touch that kind of evil and come away clean and Barry in all his faith and joy and love and belief was so untarnished.

Sometimes he made her feel guilty about that. That he could look into the night and see the impossible when all she saw was the real world. A world which was far from perfect.  
Which was why she’d never believed in a higher power. Sure, she’d never been brought up that way and, sure, belief had never come easy to her. She spent most of her teens dissuading Barry from running after UFO sightings and urban legends like a little Fox Mulder after all. But she also just couldn’t believe that the world could be the result of any kind of plan, let alone a benevolent one. 

Then came the particle accelerator. 

Barry was back from another of his impromptu X Files walkabouts and Iris was wondering if she should get the boy a leash. He was late (as usual) but even giddier than usual and she didn’t have the heart to scold him about it. It turned out they missed the cut off to watch the particle accelerator turn on and probably wouldn’t have even if some douche hadn’t snatched her bag with her laptop and precious thesis paper though that didn’t help. Back at the station with infuriating, cute Detective Eddie Thawne, Barry rushed upstairs to watch the particle accelerator on tv and make a phone call. She let him go and stayed downstairs waiting for her dad to get back. She still didn’t understand the particle accelerator or why Barry needed to watch its maiden run. It didn’t seem like there would be anything to see and besides she should be working on her thesis. 

It was like any other night in the precinct, working at her father’s desk late into the night. Barry alive with some nonsense or other, her father off saving the city, and Iris trying to figure out what she was going to do with her life if no one would let her do anything. Any other night until a destiny centuries in the making and already (for some) centuries in the past came for them like an express train.

It was hard to say what came first: the storm or the explosion. Or maybe they were part of the same thing. Minutes after the vast engine in bowels of STAR Labs roared to life and neutrons in the trillions began to collide, something snapped. Some critical stitch in the fabric of reality tore loose and something from beyond charged into Central City. The sky lit up like the Aurora Borealis and a wave of power with no sound to proceed it burst forth. The windows shattered. The light bulbs exploded one after another. Iris threw herself to the ground, her heart stopped within her chest. A millisecond stretched out into eternity as the force crackled over her skin like a hungry living thing. Searching. And then it was gone leaving her unchanged and gasping on the precinct’s tiled floor. Her ears ringing from a sound too low to hear. 

Later, she would wonder if it had been a voice.

Later, she would learn about the pacemakers that had shorted out, the blood vessels in brains that had burst, the car crashes, the planes that had plummeted from the sky. Later still, she would learn about the metas, the people the force hadn’t passed by. But that night all she cared about was that her father’s partner of 10 years bled out in a barn and that her best friend wasn’t waking up, might never wake up. 

Over a year later, she cradled infuriating, intelligent, honest, sweet, beautiful Eddie Thawne in her arms as he died trying to prevent a terrible legacy. The man who saved Barry’s life tried to drive a vibrating hand through his heart. A singularity almost ate their city, their world, alive. A hero was lost to the void on his wedding day. 

Another year gone, and some other Joe West was dead. Barry watched his father, finally free, fall to the ground breathing one last breath. Iris learned her mother was never dead, that she had been abandoned and then she watched her die, felt that death all over again. They put Henry Allen in the ground beside his wife. They put Iris’s mother in the ground alone. Zoom tried to bring the multiverse crashing down. Iris watched Barry tear himself apart, for her, for everything they had ever loved and lost together.

Then it was winter again and Iris felt a death sentence branded on her skin. She used to think that sometimes bad things happened to good people because that was the way things were, that was just how the math worked out. Now she knew she was wrong. Bad things happened to good people because the universe was cruel and it made them happen. 

The voices that spoke to Barry in the Speed Force were not benevolent but they were powerful and they made choices. It was no secret that they had chosen Barry. Iris had no doubt they had chosen her too, chosen all of them. 

Because the laws of chance and probability didn’t make someone who defused bombs into a living bomb. Didn’t grant the powers of the storm to brothers meant to perish in it. In the real world, the world she had known, shark researchers didn’t become shark men. Criminals with an Narcissus complex didn’t walk through mirrors. Nature and evolution didn’t turn a young engineer’s dreams for the future into apocalyptic visions. Didn’t turn a woman named Snow to ice. Didn’t make a hero out of a boy who could only run away. Didn’t offer everything and snatch it all away. 

Only something with a sick sense of humor, a love of tragic irony, could do that. The hand of fate played heavy in their lives and it was all Iris could do to keep from raging against its edicts. But how do you fight time? How do you fight the universe, Speed Force, voices that make fools of gods and gods of fools? What was the point if you were always meant to lose?

Still she kept going, held on. Fought and fought. Because giving up wasn’t something Iris West knew how to do.


End file.
